


Keeping Up Appearances

by MJ (mjr91)



Category: The Blacklist
Genre: Blackslash, Floriana Campo is better off dead, Implied Slash, Little Black Dress, M/M, Minor Character Death, Watching Red kill worse villains is fun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-30
Updated: 2013-10-30
Packaged: 2017-12-31 00:07:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1024988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mjr91/pseuds/MJ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raymond Reddington wanted Floriana Campo dead, and he got it.  He reflects on why he had her killed by The Freelancer.  There are things the FBI doesn't know, and doesn't need to know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keeping Up Appearances

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bluevelvetspock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluevelvetspock/gifts).



> Based on S1x02 of The Blacklist: It's pretty obvious that Red killed Floriana Campo for reasons having to do with his bodyguard, Dembe. If that wasn't the only reason, it was certainly one of the reasons. The title, of course, is from one of Red's own quotes. Not in canon with any other Blackslash; intended as a one-shot but if anyone's interested and the planets align, I might find more here.

He only looked soft.

He wasn't one not to appreciate the luxuries of life – a handmade Turnbull and Asser shirt, a properly fitted suit, the Grand Suites at the Pierre in New York, the aged D-rump steak with marrow at The Hawksmoor in London (with the side of roasted field mushrooms, and the roast scallops with white port and garlic, thank you, yes, that would be lovely). He appreciated them more than most men with his kind of money, because not only had he not always had that kind of money, but because unlike those who had either inherited their wealth or earned it at least semi-legally, he'd lived through the sort of experiences that make one appreciate luxuries for what they really are. He'd hardly been raised in this level of comfort – he'd lived hard.

The fire-fight in Cambodia. That had been unexpected and unpleasant. The assassination attempt in Barcelona. Sloppily handled by the Americans, yes, but it had still been… difficult. He hadn't lied about the kidnapping by the Somali pirates. Shipping containers? He never wanted to see the inside of another one. Deep holes in the ground? He still had claustrophobia.

He'd made it through the Naval Academy; he'd gotten the hell out of the States as a naval captain. He'd more than once ruined a shirt from rolling up his sleeves and repairing an engine, both in and after the military; had field-stripped weapons; had lived in the field, or in cramped, filthy quarters on a damaged ship. Naval Intelligence had come with its discomforts – it hadn’t precisely been a desk job that he'd had, officer or no. He could make a bomb, though he preferred to pay for that, and he could sail a ship or pilot a plane, though he preferred paying for those to be done, too, now that he could. He might enjoy good wine or a fine dinner, but he'd drunk raw alcohol in mercenary camps, had eaten – well, God alone knew what or who those Somalis had fed him. He'd definitely eaten insects, and was perfectly willing to contemplate that the Somali pirates had fed him one or more of their other victims in that swill they called a meat stew.

He'd had no illusions on that fatal December 24, two dozen or so years before, that he'd be living in comfort at any future date; for all the money he'd known he might now make at his new occupation as a broker of somewhat unconventional goods and services, he'd never expected to be living as he did now, hiding in plain sight at the Plaza Athenee, the Dorchester, the Carlyle, with concierges – concierges, now there was a joke – all knowing him by one of the three or four names under which he had fully-fledged identities. Sleeping under a plane on tarmac in Vietnam? Napping in a tree in Belize? Giving up on sleep entirely with what had gone down that week in Surinam? He'd earned his jet – it wasn't that large, really, more a business necessity than an actual luxury – and room service at The Carlyle a hundred times over since he'd left the Navy. 

The United States Navy had trained him to kill. With a gun, with his hands, with naval and aerial weaponry. He'd developed a few refinements of his own, it was true, for when he needed to do it himself these days – in his line of work, it didn't do to be squeamish, so it paid to kill someone when you said you would, as an example for other badly-behaved clientele. Other than that, he'd only ever done it himself, since leaving the military, in self-defense, or defending others – not that he hadn't had to do it more often than he really cared to. Elizabeth Keen thought that made him a monster. Perhaps it did. If so, however, he was to his own mind made so, at least germinally, by the same United States government that had also trained her and had handed her a weapon. 

She really had no idea just how very alike they were. Pushed to her limit, given the need to defend someone, she'd kill someday just as easily as he seemed to. 

The Federal Suite at the Hay Adams Hotel was comfortable enough for him to lean on the balcony rail and reflect on this. The staff at the Hay Adams knew David Kensington, an American-born Swiss national, by name, and the view of the White House from the suite's private balcony was ironically pleasant, which amused him. Perhaps the Secret Service was scrutinizing the view of the Hay Adams, unaware that the close-cropped businessman in the Jermyn Street suit – oh, they'd know it was the now-Swiss Mr. Kensington; they checked the hotel records, certainly – was his persona-non-grata self. Only a long-outdated shaggy-haired picture of him was plastered across law enforcement desks everywhere in the country including theirs. Age, a haircut, and very slight cosmetic surgery from covering up the marks of an unfortunate incident or two had changed his appearance just enough to make the photo useless.

Really, the President was quite safe from him. Assassinations weren't his speed. Facilitating one, for the right sum, perhaps, but killing a President himself? That was too much like work, and work that was no longer in his job description. If the President didn't have a gun to his head, he had no reason to point one at the President.

He'd killed for personal gratification only once. He'd enjoyed watching the death thoroughly, although he hadn't put the poison in the champagne himself, but had only arranged it. Even then, the gratification wasn't the sort that Elizabeth Keen or that semi-educable idiot, Agent Donald Ressler – really, the man must have been in special education at whatever low-level public school he'd attended – would understand. Gratification wasn't always about pleasure or delight. Sometimes it slaked the passions; at other times it simply mollified a pain temporarily, or satisfied a need. This time, he was gratified that real justice had been carried out.

When he'd had that virago Floriana Campo killed, there had been reason. That had gratified him. She'd been a hypocrite, a liar, a destroyer of young lives. While he had no inherent objection to the buying and selling of sexual services (he'd been a purchaser of them, from the very adult and very willing, more than enough times, after all), the thought of forcing oneself on a drugged young child was contemptible. That she had used her position as a rich, charitable true believer in saving youth to disguise her actual career as a purveyor of primarily pre-nubile flesh had been revolting to him – had she really ever believed he'd agree to her offer to cut him in as a partner? He'd not been much of a father to his daughter, even before he'd left, but his basically benign negligence and then abandonment of her was hardly in the same category as the defilement and destruction Campo wrought. Any of the girls Campo shipped could have been his daughter, and the boys…

When he'd begun dealing in the Sudan, the rebel forces he was helping to outfit had sent a young, handsome, English-speaking aide to help bodyguard him. He'd seen the mark on Dembe's shoulder, had thought it at first to be tribal.

Then he'd discovered one night, alone with Dembe at his hotel, what it was, and who had been responsible for its being carved into Dembe's body, and why. He'd hated Floriana Campo since the day he'd found out her real occupation. 

Having Campo killed, and being able to watch her die, had been sweet. It hadn't been for himself that he'd had it done; it had been a gift for Dembe, and that had made it one of the great pleasures of his life. Dembe had come into Campo's suite only at the end, when the FBI had demanded to enter, and he had been able to see Campo breathe her last as well. 

He'd not made it home until morning when Campo died, nor had Dembe, who'd been bodyguarding him – not until he'd counseled Elizabeth Keen on an issue of hers regarding her marriage. Interesting that she always came to him with personal problems, when she always claimed that she thought he had no life, compared to her. He commented to her occasionally that he had her, which was true and was all she needed to know. She didn't need to know that he'd fallen asleep, back in his suite, with his cheek pressed to a certain scar on a certain former rebel fighter's shoulder, or that the man beside him slept with one eye open and a gun under his pillow. She didn't need to know that they had done so together, at least intermittently, since his first business dealings in the Sudan.

It was why he'd conned the FBI into bringing Dembe on as his full-time bodyguard. He knew they'd agree, because Dembe's record was clean, and his reputation as a fighter was established. 

Dembe looked hard, and only he was aware that Dembe was not always a hard man. Dembe only looked hard.

He, on the other hand, only looked soft.


End file.
